


takotsubo

by emi_rose



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Forgiveness, Gen, Reconciliation, can you imagine?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 13:56:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12865956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emi_rose/pseuds/emi_rose
Summary: It takes a loss to set reconciliation in motion.





	takotsubo

They’ve all been through unimaginable grief, swimming down and down into the depths of loss. But this loss is different.

Lucretia watches silently, hot tears rolling down her cheeks, as her friends and colleagues file out of the room, air still heavy with the finality of death. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, that this death is different from the dozens before, that there are no silver threads ready to reform into the shape of her heart.

Through the haze of her grief, Lucretia barely registers the remaining presence in the room. When Taako reaches out to touch her shoulder, his contact makes her stiffen, expecting a reproach, a twist of the knife borne of his own heavy loss, a barb that would taint what few years she assumed she had left.  

Instead, there is only the comforting weight of his arm around her, something she hadn’t felt since the Light fell for the last time. Since before she broke their bonds irrevocably. He sits down on the end of the bed, careful not to muss the covers. He takes both of her hands in his, with nothing but tenderness, and lets out a shaky breath.

“He loved you, even after everything,” he whispers, voice breaking. 

Lucretia can’t seem to form words, so she nods as if to say she knows, a fresh wave of tears spilling onto their joined hands. For the first time since the destruction of their home plane, she is at a loss for words. She can’t imagine writing, putting a pale imitation of this moment on paper. She expects to spend her few remaining days alone, and yet, in this moment, she is loved still, by the one person she least expected to care.

They sit like this for who knows how long - time has once again become meaningless - allowing this strange grace to settle into their hearts, allowing them to imagine the possibility of forgiveness. 

The next morning, Lucretia awakes, the other side of the bed cold for the first time since her lonely decade, and the Magnus-shaped hole in her heart makes itself known. Her joints seem stiffer and the air is colder, and she supposes the cat and dogs have abandoned her as well. She is halfway down the stairs when she smells food, and this suffices as an explanation for where the animals have gone, but when she realizes it can’t possibly be her husband cooking, the pendulum of grief swings back into her stomach. 

Judging from the way that he’d taken over the entire first floor of the little house, Taako had spent his sleepless night cooking furiously, sublimating grief into delicious food, absolutely none of which could possibly appeal to Lucretia. And yet. She has to try. 

She pushes food around her plate, mechanically chewing and swallowing a few bites that taste like cardboard. He does the same. She notices that he still cooked for seven. He probably always would. 

Lucretia looks tired, is tired. She has spent her life since the Day of Story and Song working herself to the bone in an effort to atone for her sins, to undo the damage she did to her family and to do penance for all the people she could not save. 

They sit on the cozy porch swing that Magnus had made years ago, topped with overstuffed cushions Lucretia had sewn with substantial “help” from the animal residents of their house. 

Her voice is raspy with age, but still carries behind it the gravitas she cultivated for decades and the steel that brought her home through every trial. 

“I’m sorry. For everything.”

He puts an arm around her and holds her close.

“I know.” 

This is the forgiveness she’s worked so hard to earn. She slips away, and by the time he realizes she’s gone, the light has changed to the afternoon glow she always sought to paint. 

None of their friends had strayed far in the wake of Magnus’s death, and it’s easy enough for Taako to gather them again, to say goodbye too soon, too late, no one really knew anymore. He kisses her forehead gently, and wishes her soul well.

**Author's Note:**

> a huge thank you to @epersonae for helping me germinate this into a plot and to @weatheredlaw and @amazingsuperiority for editing! i love you all so much, sorry for killing lucretia again. titled after the long lecture on cardiomyopathies i sat through today - takotsubo cardiomyopathy is also called 'broken heart syndrome' and is one explanation for why so many older couples die in very close proximity.


End file.
